Edmonton's top 10 neighbourhoods might be unexpected gems: U of A students

Just toss Avenue Edmonton’s best neighbourhood list — that’s Janna Bradshaw and Stephanie Kovach’s best advice for a millennial who is house hunting.

The two University of Alberta human geography and planning students set out to use Edmonton’s Open Data catalogue to analyze the best neighbourhoods for the generation born between the early 1980s and 2000s, the millennials. For fun, they compared it to the annual ranking in the local monthly lifestyle magazine.

The lists were completely different. Looking at access to things like bike lanes, good transit, recreation, schools and restaurants — Avenue favourites like Glenora, Strathcona and Westmount didn’t even rank.

Instead, the top neighbourhoods were Central McDougall north of downtown, Carter Crest near the Terwillegar Recreation Centre and Woodcroft north of Coronation Park.

“We were quite surprised,” said Bradshaw, who is presenting their work with the rest of professor Manish Shirgaokar’s class at City Hall Tuesday. Each student or team tackled a different local question, trying to learn something new about Edmonton through spatial analysis.

The students looked at transit usage, cannabis regulations, the ability for seniors to age in a neighbourhood and other topics. The posters will be on display from noon to 3 p.m. in the City Room.

If Bradshaw was house hunting? “I would honestly start with Central McDougall. It’s close to a tonne of amenities. It’s walkable, close to downtown and also relatively affordable.”

The students mapped out proximity to schools, post-secondary, LRT and transit centres, city recreation facilities and libraries, grocery stores, restaurants and parks. They also mapped out Edmonton’s crime rates and litter, assigning negative points for that.

Avenue Edmonton builds its list from an annual popularity survey, which Kovach suspects caters to their more well-heeled, more-established audience.

The neighbourhoods on Avenue Edmonton’s list could be called hip or trendy. The neighbourhoods on the students list are possibly overlooked but still meet the criteria if someone is looking for walkable access to the things that give a good quality of life, she said. “We think these are neighbourhoods that have quite a bit of potential.”

Thomas Lippiatt is an urban planning student at the University of Alberta who used Edmonton’s open data to study the spatial impacts of proposed cannabis legislation.Larry Wong /
POSTMEDIA NETWORK

That’s further restricted by limits on being within 200 metres of a school or library, plus 100 metres from a park or recreation centre.

Since his analysis, the city has changed the proposed rules slightly. It will no longer ban a shop from being close to a liquor store and allows shops in industrial areas. But that won’t reduce the supply deserts, especially in the southwest.

“One goal of (legalization) is to displace the black market,” he said. If people can’t access legal cannabis easily, that might not be achieved, he said and urged council to consider that spatial distribution. “It’s a pretty significant part of Edmonton.”

Edmonton’s top 10 neighbourhoods for millennials according to University of Alberta human geography and planning students Janna Bradshaw and Stephanie Kovach.Janna Bradshaw/Stephanie Kovach

Top 10 neighbourhoods for millennials

1 — Central McDougall

2 — Carter Crest

3 — Woodcroft

4 — Ottewell

5 — McCauley

6 — Spruce Avenue

7 — Oliver

8 — Griesbach

9 — Kameyosek

10 — Bellevue

Cannabis supply deserts

The current council rules for cannabis will create “supply deserts” that could hurt efforts to lure consumers away from buying cannabis on the black market, says University of Alberta graduate student Thomas Lippiatt. He is presenting this poster summarizing his work at City Hall on Tuesday, April 10, 2018.Thomas Lippiatt

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